Thursday, August 28, 2008

Second - The second purpose of an article is submit to article directories. This is also good for your website in that you can get traffic from the link to your web page in the resource section of the article, and also a link back to your page from the directory that will help your Google PageRank. Again, however, this is no good to a School Kid with no website. So what do they do?

Affiliate marketing! In affiliate marketing you make money by selling products belonging to other people in return for a commission. If you are marketing goods that can be delivered online, such as eBooks and software, your commissions average around 50% of the sales price, but can be even higher.

Most people promote affiliate products from their website or blog, but School Kids can’t do that so how can a School Kid make money online using articles? To answer that, let’s take a step back and discuss the normal way of promoting affiliate products. You would usually design a web page either to review an affiliate product or to write a bit about how it help you to solve a problem.

It’s not your job as an affiliate marketer to sell the product, but to pre-sell it, and reviews and write-ups help to do that. You then provide a link to the merchant’s sales page, and the merchant makes the sale, takes the payments, delivers the product and deals with queries and complaints. All you do is get prospects to your landing page (your review page) and then sit back and wait for the paycheck.

There is another way, however. You can send the prospect directly to the merchant’s sales page and bypass the review stage. Merchants manage to sell very well without needing your input. If you send somebody straight to the sales page, you don’t need a website: in fact you don’t need anything of your own except your computer and an internet connection.

Starting to get the picture now? The School Kid fires up the laptop, registers for an affiliate program, writes a few articles stressing various problems people could have trying to make money online, and then proves the link to the merchant’s sales page as providing a product that will solve the problem. He sends the articles off to a hundred or so article directories and waits. People read the articles, click the link and buy the product. Simple: and it works as easy as it sounds.

This is no pie-in-the-sky harebrained idea: this actually makes a lot of people a lot of money. The School Kid gets the commission paid into an online account, and has made money without needing a red cent of capital to get started. That’s how even a School Kid can make money online: articles and affiliate programs. No wonder article writing’s alternative online name is ‘School Kid marketing’!

Monday, August 4, 2008

It’s true! Even a School Kid can make money online. I bet you thought you had to have loads of capital, a website that you pay for each month and a home. Not true! Anybody can make money online without any money to start with at all, even a School Kid or a bum. Well, let me restate that: even a School Kid or a bum with a laptop (or access to a library). Nobody can go anywhere online without a computer, and if you don’t have a permanent address then it has to be a laptop, or you need to visit the library.

How the School Kid got the laptop is something for their parents to worry about, and nothing to do with this article, so don’t dwell on it. Grab a cup, sit back and listen. Take notes if you have to. There are a zillion ways to make money on the internet, but most of them need some form of working capital, you know, money to promote your endeavor after you buy into whatever it is you have decided to market online.

These network marketing programs you might have heard about are not free, not inexpensive, not cheap, they cost a lot of money: you either pay good money for the product you have to sell, pay good money to enter the program or pay your hard earned cash for leads and advertising material. They also take a lot more time to set up and make money from than most people are prepared to give. Not to mention the sweat equity involved in contacting all those leads you developed and trying to convince them that your network marketing business opportunity is the one that will make them rich!

Have you heard of article marketing? Just about anyone with a presense online has heard about article marketing, and they use article marketing to promote their blogs and websites. The usual purpose of writing an article is two-fold:

First - To use as content for their webpage. The best online advertising you can get is to be listed on the first page of a search engine for a keyword relating to the content of your web page. It doesn’t matter wher that web page is located; on a website; on a blog; or even on a Squidoo lens. This type of free advertising can get you a lot of highly targeted traffic, because those that reach that listing on Google, for example, got there by using a search term, or keyword, relating to your page.

Is this really free advertising? Well, sorta. But not if you had to pay for the website you’re trying to promote. So if you were a School Kid you wouldn’t be in that position. You would have no website, hence no Google traffic.

I know it's a cheap trick, but . . . . Check back next week for part 2 of Even a School Kid can Make Money Online.